Issue #03/84, February 29 - March 10, 2000  

The eXile’s 1st Annual Worst Journalist Competition

by Matt Taibbi

Welcome back, sports fans! In case you missed the gala kickoff last issue, the eXile is holding its first annual March Madness Worst Journalist Contest. We bracketed 32 of the city’s leading hacks into pairs and pitted them notebook to notebook in dog-eat-dog competition. Sixteen lucky winners advanced in our last issue; what follow are the results of Round Two, which determined who will appear in the tournament’s final eight.

Unlike the first round, in which there was a great deal of close competition, the second round was characterized by blowouts. The match between The Financial Times’s John Thornhill and The Globe and Mail’s Geoffrey York, for instance, had to be stopped in the first quarter by officials when Thornhill was hit with a technical foul for taunting after pulling off a string of nine unanswered mixed metaphors. It was that kind of day for the underdogs.

As far as we’re concerned, though, the blowouts only ensured that there would be no weak links left in the field. See for yourself; here’s how Round two went:

Sometimes the worst part about a newspaper article is its headline. In this case, giant-killer John Thornhill, who knocked off #1 seed Rick Paddock in the first round, could have breezed past overmatched challenger Geoffrey York of The Globe and Mail solely on the strength of the headline from his Feb. 12 article, "Sale may signal business clean-up." Preposterously, Thornhill’s article argued that the sale of some of the UK-based Trans World Aluminum company’s Russian assets to shareholders of the Sibneft oil company signaled a "cleaning-up" phase in the development of Russian business. As in "Trans World’s assets in Russia will be more honestly run under Roman Abramovitch and Boris Berezovsky."

This is, quite possibly, the stupidest thing to be written by a Western journalist living in Russia this year. A remarkable combination of intellectual, moral, and personal inadequacies are required to will into being an article such as this, and Thornhill clearly has all of them in abundance. For instance, take the following set of paragraphs:

‘The move comes at a time when several of Russia’s business oligarchs are making efforts to "clean up" their businesses in anticipation that Vladimir Putin is elected president in March.

‘Mr Putin has stressed he wants to create equal rules of the game for all businesses in Russia and is increasing the pressure on Russia’s oligarchs to invest at home rather than siphon their cash abroad.’

To write sentences like these without elaborating upon them, a reporter must be first and foremost a supremely lazy and apathetic person, for no diligent journalist or careful writer would ever expose to his reader to such an unseemly pile of unanswered questions. Which of Russia’s "several business oligarchs" does Thornhill mean? What "efforts" can Thornhill point to that any of these oligarchs have made to "clean up" their businesses? And what, concretely, does Thornhill have in mind when he says that Putin is "increasing the pressure" on oligarchs to invest at home? Thornhill doesn’t elaborate on any of this and just leaves us hanging. Even if these two paragraphs weren’t the insane bullshit that they are, this would be the sloppiest of sloppy newswriting.

Which is too bad, because one cannot afford to be sloppy when one is being as crudely cynical and dishonest as Thornhill is being here. Thornhill does not answer any of these unanswered questions because, as he must surely know, there are no answers to them. The oligarchs are not "cleaning up", and there is no evidence that Putin--the man who was once the loyal chief deputy to Pavel Borodin, Russia’s all-time leading capital exporter-- is pressuring anyone to invest at home rather than send money abroad. And as for attaching the names of Abramovich (who was once arrested for stealing railroad wagons full of petroleum) and Berezovsky (who was recently refused a visa to the Davos conference in anticipation of his indictment on money-laundering charges) to the idea of "clean" business... well, that’s just disgusting. Thornhill should be fed his own testicles for writing such a thing.

Meanwhile, Thornhill’s opponent, Geoff York, bowed out of the tournament with a thorough bio on Putin, including as an afterthought a fair part of the necessary information that the dissolute, lazy hack Thornhill elected to leave out of his article. Here’s a passage that Thornhill could have, and should have, put in his piece after his mention of Putin:

"After Mr. Sobchak lost the mayor’s job in 1996, Mr. Putin moved to Moscow and became a senior aide in the Kremlin property department -- one of the most secretive and corrupt branches of the presidential administration. It used a closed bidding system to conceal its own business dealings, worth billions of dollars, and to award lucrative contracts to well-connected insiders."

We wanted York to advance because he still hasn’t reviewed our book and we therefore still need the leverage, but we were helpless before God on this one. We could write a hundred books and it wouldn’t justify getting Thornhill out of this tournament yet. York out; The Financial Times stays alive.

One thing that too few journalists are censured for is the crime of blowing the gatekeeper to get in the gate. Whether it’s in the form of too-enthusiastically gushing over a highly-placed official who has deigned to give you an exclusive interview, or (in this case), in the form of writing nice things about the armed force that leads you on a tour of the territory it has decimated, you’re always screwing your reader in the end if you sell your soul to get him a scoop. In her February 13 piece, "Grozny’s Basement Survivors Find Few Signs of Life", Maura Reynolds of the L.A. Times without a doubt screws her reader badly-- but only after nauseating him with her atrocious writing skills.

Here’s the lead to Reynolds’s piece:

‘GROZNY, Russia-- The ground here in Chechnya’s capital is literally scorched. It stretches, black and tender, between piles of concrete too shapeless even to be called ruins.’

First of all, what does the phrase "literally scorched" mean? Can one have a "figuratively scorched" ground? What would such a ground look like? Secondly, the inclusion of the word "tender" here sets off a virtual explosion of superfluous and/or ineptly-applied modifiers. By my reckoning there are at least 10 clearly superfluous adjectives in this article: "tender", "dusty", "smoky", "grimy", "filthy", "deep", "timid", "green" and "charred" (cruelly herded together in the positively loathsome sentence, "But with the dawn, some evidence of hope emerges like green shoots through charred earth") and "dark".

But Reynolds’s poor writing is the least of her worries in this piece. The really disgusting part about her article is her thinly-disguised flattery of the Emergencies Ministry, who I would bet almost anything acted as her guide for at least part of this story (the tipoff being that she quotes an Emergencies Ministry driver). Throughout the piece, she describes the Ministry (the MChS) in a way that makes them out to be a sort of Russian Red Cross--a benevolent aid service helping war victims. Here’s one example:

‘...Russian officials moving in to begin the slow job of clearing the destruction and healing the victims find themselves debating whether the landscape looks more like Dresden or Stalingrad.

‘``They said they would bomb Grozny to the ground. Well, they bombed Grozny to the ground,’’ said Alexander Kudryashov, an emergencies ministry driver arriving in the city with food and medicine.’

And another example:

‘Looking for a site for a field hospital, the emergencies ministry resorted to an old bus depot on the edge of town. The roof was only half missing.

‘"In a couple of days, I think we’ll be seeing about 300 people a day,’’ said Serge Goncharov, the doctor running the hospital, which treated its first patients Saturday. ``Children will be coming back, and they will pick up anything. They pick up grenades and get their hands blown off. It happens to adults too.’’’

And another, in this case casting the ministry as one of those "green shoots" of hope:

‘The emergencies ministry has set up four feeding stations offering hot meals once a day.’

What Reynolds has conveniently forgotten to tell her reader is that the Emergencies Minister, Sergei Shoigu, has been one of the staunchest nuke-’em-till-they-glow supporters of the Chechen war effort right from the very beginning. As the head of the pro-Putin, pro-war Unity party, Shoigu was the driving voice behind the effort to rally the Russian population into a bloodlust over Chechnya. Shoigu was the one who directed the effort to send civilian refugees back into Chechnya so that they could have their heads blown off by Russian bombs. What’s more, Reynolds seems to forget that the MChS is also an armed force which participated in the fighting in Chechnya. In several places, she actually contrasts the MChS with the soldiers, a gross error. The MChS doctors and aid workers she encountered may be genuinely good people, but they are working for the very organization which brought about the emergency that required their charity.

Leaving all of this stuff out is too high a price to pay for a guided tour of a bomb site.

The eXile prescribes a soaking and ten friendly minutes with a car battery to Reynolds’s opponent, Brian Whitmore of The Boston Globe, for quoting the wretched ex-World Bank quote whore Charles Blitzer in his Feb. 2 piece, "Russia’s Dirty Money". Otherwise, however, Whitmore’s piece on the Mabetex scandal was solid and thorough. He never had a chance in this one. Reynolds on to round three; New England’s last hope bows out.

Why does Gareth Jones always have that smile on his face? Because he knows there will always be jobs for people willing and able to write cringing, voluminously syrupy praise of Swine in Power. In our last visit to Jonesland we caught the Reuters standout tripping over himself to call repulsive Duma vermin Gennady Seleznyov "dapper"; in this round Jones contrives somehow to describe as "charming" a man who is primarily distinguished by his lack of personality and presence--Vladimir Putin.

Here’s the lead to Jones’s piece:

‘MOSCOW, Feb 3 (Reuters) - The door opens. A short, brisk man strides out purposefully with a bevy of aides in tow and ushers his waiting guest politely into a seat.

‘Vladimir Putin oozes cool confidence after barely a month as Russia’s acting president, and on Wednesday U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright became the latest Western official to feel the force of his charm.’

First, the small mistakes. I’m not sure a man can be "brisk". He can have a brisk walk, but I don’t think he himself can be brisk. Secondly, about the politeness of Putin’s ushering of Madeline into her seat...well, what the hell was he supposed to do-- give her a wedgie and kick her in the knees? In a less routinely slavish writer than Jones, calling attention (in the lead!) to a politician’s observance of absolutely mandatory politeness might be dismissed as simply an oversight or evidence of mild laziness, but in Jones it fits in all too nicely with the overall pattern of his rhetoric. As was the case with Seleznyov, the guy likes to give powerful people credit for anything and everything they have to offer-- right down, in Putin’s case, to an ability to not act like a slobbering beast in public.

Furthermore, Jones here commits the always-irritating sin of reporting as fact the mythical reactions and emotions of public figures during public events. How do we know Madeline Albright felt "the full force of his charm"? Even if she said she did--which she didn’t, exactly--there would be no reason to believe her. In general this kind of extrapolation of the feelings of public figures has the overall effect of making them seem larger than life. Tell us what they said, tell us what you think they felt, but don’t tell us what they felt, because you can’t possibly know. I mean, who’s your source, Santa Claus? That’s particularly true in this case, when the likelihood of Albright’s having been genuinely charmed by Vladimir Putin is... well, I’d say absolutely zero, but then again, Madeline Albright probably hasn’t had sex with a man in a long time, so who knows.

It is probably necessary to admit the remote possibility that Jones here is being ironic in his use of this overtly ridiculous "full force of his charm" phrase. If this is indeed the case, it is a very sad, very small, and very timid joke, one which does little more than underscore the humiliatingly severe limits on self-expression that must be the rule for chain-gang writers at places like Reuters. If it is not a joke, then Jones is either a fool or a mean propagandist. To call Vladimir Putin charming in the middle of the decimation of Grozny is inappropriate almost any way you look at it.

Jones goes on, as he did with Seleznyov, to throw all kinds of nice words at Putin: he is "firm", "alert", "healthy", a man who has "vigour" and "a clear grasp of his brief" (is this another joke, with a touch of Freud added?) and should be praised for his "measured flexibility" and "decisiveness". Jones also adds, incorrectly, that Putin has avoided "the sharp language used by some Russian officials" in talking about the Chechen war. Wasn’t it Vladimir Putin who said, "We’ll kill them even in the toilet"? What could be sharper than that?

But Jones’s utter desperation to attach any kind of positive adjective to Putin is best borne out in the following passage:

‘``This guy (Putin) is self-assured, but he has every reason to be, considering his popularity (in Russia),’’ said one official in Albright’s party, adding that ``steely’’ was not an inappropriate adjective to apply to the former KGB spy.’

Jones here couldn’t even get an anonymous official to confirm, without prodding, that the use of the blurry and utterly meaningless adjective "steely" was positively appropriate. The best he can get out of his source is a "not inappropriate", with prodding. These are some pretty serious verbal gymnastics. You’ll never look far for work in this world if you’re willing to make stretches like that.

In contrast, Andrew Jack of The Financial Times in his Feb 12. 109-word dispatch, "Rebels ‘Surrender to Police" used only one adjective, "local"--and he didn’t have to stretch for it. Jones therefore advances easily, ending the FT’s hopes for putting two writers into the final eight.

Owen Matthews hasn’t filed since the last round. Michael Gordon doesn’t have that problem. He’s been filing constantly, on a daily basis almost, delivering detailed accounts of the war zone in Chechnya home to the friendly folks who read The New York Times. In fact, Gordon’s been so prodigiously successful at filing while other big-time reporters haven’t that he even made the news recently on account of it. A thing called Editors and Publishers magazine, a boosterish industry-friendly trade magazine about print media--a sort of Adweek for hacks--published an article on January 24 in which Gordon was lauded not only for being the sole big-market print reporter working in Russia to consistently deliver stories from the front, but for being the only major print reporter responsible enough to fully cooperate with the Russian authorities and stay within the "rules" in covering the war. The piece, by E & P’s Joe Strupp, leads off by talking about the failure of certain major news organizations to gain access to the war because their reporters "lacked the proper credentials" and were detained by Russian authorities.

The reporters Strupp is talking about, seven in all, are Daniel Williams of The Washington Post, David Filipov of The Boston Globe, Marcus Warren of The Electronic Telegraph; Rodriguez Fernandez of Spain’s El Pais; Ricardo Ortego of Spanish Antenna 3 TV; and Ortego’s camera operator, Teimuraz Gabashvili.

Ostensibly detained for lacking the proper credentials, what these reporters were really detained for was doing their jobs--i.e. not restricting themselves to the Russian side of the war, and attempting to get to the Chechen side to give a more balanced picture of what was going on. What they did took guts and integrity--all were risking losing their immediate livelihoods by having permission to work in Russia revoked by the authorities. Furthermore, the news organizations they worked for showed some huevos by being willing to get beat by The New York Times from time to time in order to give their journalists a chance to cover the war correctly.

Editors and Publishers doesn’t call attention to any of this, or give any of these journalists credit for doing the right thing; instead, it castigates them in not-so-subtle fashion for their poor market performance in comparison to Gordon’s New York Times:

‘A review of stories about the war published in daily newspapers over several days last week revealed that each news organization had taken decidedly different approaches to coverage.

‘On Jan. 17, for example, The New York Times published a first-person account by Gordon of Russian officials touring the war-torn area in Chechnya, responding to complaints from refugees, and keeping watch for snipers.

‘The same day, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post each published AP stories on other events, with the Post offering only a world briefs item on air attacks over Grozny that used a Defense Ministry source...

‘... Although The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post also have published staff-written material about the war, most of the stories have been datelined Moscow and have reported on issues linked to the Russian capital rather than inside Chechnya.’

The second paragraph of the above excerpt provides a rare, sickening glimpse at the true face of the news business. Strupp obviously doesn’t know anything about the Chechen war; he doesn’t know how loaded and ambiguous phrases like "responding to complaints from refugees" and "keeping watch for snipers" are. He also doesn’t care. For Strupp, the industry analyst, it doesn’t matter what it was Gordon got-- it only matters that he got it. That’s what modern news is all about-getting a story that contains the titillating superficial aspects of good reporting, regardless of whether the reporting is any good or not. Get the pictures at all costs; fuck up the story if you need to.

For all of Gordon’s prodigiousness at filing, his reporting is far behind the pack and has been from the outset. Gordon came to the story late and hasn’t once left the Russian side of the battle, and his reporting is obviously skewed in a pro-Russian direction as a result. His February 14 piece, "Russian Troops Order Evacuation of Grozny", is a perfect example of his myopic approach to the war.

The piece describes in an unemotional way the Russian clean-up operation, citing information that has clearly been spoon-fed to him by the Russian authorities. Not once does he talk about the civilian casualties in Grozny, or mention the senseless marauding and burning of remaining residences by Russian troops, or describe with any kind of alarm the scale of senseless destruction wrought by the Russians in the city. Instead, he seems more to share the mean logistical concerns of the Russian commanders when he writes stuff like this:

‘Looting has been a serious problem. The first complement of pro-Russian Chechen police officers arrived Monday.’

Well, thank God for that. We’re sure they’ll do a good job. Here’s another example of Gordon acting as ventriloquist dummy to the Russian military spokesmen:

‘Col. Nikolai A. Zaitsev, a senior Interior Ministry officer, said the capital of the embattled province of Chechnya had become too dangerous for its inhabitants. It will be off-limits for two weeks while Interior Ministry troops comb the city for weapons, unexploded bombs and booby-traps.

‘Russian officers conceded that the move was also a precaution against rebel infiltration. Leaflets circulated throughout the city Monday warning residents that militants were planning a new guerrilla campaign.’

Note the use of the word "conceded" here. The officials didn’t "concede" anything to Gordon, not in the traditional sense of being presented with an independently researched fact and forced to admit its truth. No, what they did here is "concede" their pretext for evacuating the few remaining people from their homes in order to do whatever it is they’re really doing there, burying evidence or looting or whatever, in addition to sweeping for bombs. The pretext they’re "conceding" is exactly the same as the pretext for the entire war, namely that it was undertaken as a precaution against terrorist attacks. They could have just announced this pretext, but it seems a lot more convincing, a lot more like the truth, when you can "concede" it to the bureau chief of The New York Times.

How does Gordon justify sending such one-sided, biased reports home to the world’s most influential newspaper? Amazingly, he answers that question himself in the Editors and Publishers article:

‘"We made a different choice to follow rules and regulations and work within the system," said Gordon, who has filed daily dispatches from within the battle zone for a number of weeks. "Others didn’t want to, and jumped the gun."’

Yes, you caught that right--that’s Gordon actually bragging that he plays ball with the Russians to get access to war zones. No less shocking is the fact that Gordon here has the balls to denigrate his fellow journalists for "jumping the gun" in not playing along with the Russians’ wishes. It’s one thing to be a whore, but to brag about it, and also publicly thumb your nose at your colleagues for risking their lives to preserve the integrity of their profession--well, that’s another thing entirely. This is a level of professional villainy I don’t think Moscow’s Western press corps has ever seen before.

eXile readers might also have noticed that Gordon has been appearing a lot on Russian television lately. As a reward for being so obedient, he’s clearly being granted by the Russians the status of elder spokesman for the Western journalism community. Soon he’ll be co-hosting Sergei Dorenko’s show, no doubt.

I would think some kind of collective action against Gordon by his colleagues has to be pending--a boycott, a petition, a malevolent professional intrigue, something. In the meantime, Gordon remains a Menace II Society and is through to the next round in a walk.

Message to loser Owen Matthews: stop shagging leukoid chicks with turbans, air out that silk smoking jacket and file on time next time, champ. You’re letting the crowd down.

Alice Lagnado, back from her sojourn in elaborate and long-winded disguise in Chechnya, has apparently not filed in the past two weeks. There are some people who have argued that a reporter who does not file should automatically advance to the next round. We at the eXile disagree. On the contrary, in most cases, a reporter should be rewarded for not filing. There are lots of journalists out there who argue that criticism of their hack-formulaic articles is unfair, because they’re just doing their jobs, doing what their editors tell them to do, etc. In response to that argument we have the following to say: hey, there’s always McDonald’s, guys. Nobody’s forcing you at gunpoint to write blowjob pieces about monsters like Vladimir Putin, or to run around Grozny with fake beards on, angling for book contracts. There are other jobs out there.

Therefore it makes no sense to keep someone in the running for the title of worst journalist if someone has just made the best possible case against his candidacy, i.e. has simply stopped practicing journalism.

The question probably would have been moot in this case, anyway, for Lagnado’s boss, Giles Whittell, put forth a strong enough effort to guarantee victory against anything Lagnado was likely to cough up. The lead to his Feb. 8 piece, "Chechen Warlords In Bitter Battle for Power", went as follows:

‘AS SHAMIL BASAYEV’s foot was amputated under local anaesthetic last week outside Grozny, he let the video cameras roll. The rebel warlord’s flair for publicity may serve him well as Chechens and the wider world wait for a leader to emerge from the wreckage of the republic’s latest war.’

This is not exactly a lead-o-matic lead, but close, an affectionate salute to one. The "As something happened near something that is located next to something else last week, something happened" structure of the lead sentence is classic lead-o-matic language. Two elements are missing, however. One is the lead-o-matic byline. The standard form insists upon (EXOTIC CITY, Foreign Country) as the byline location, but Whittell couldn’t do that one because, as you knew if you looked closely, he wasn’t at the exotic scene of the crime. The actual byline reads, "FROM GILES WHITTELL IN MOSCOW’, which actually could have been amended to read "FROM GILES WHITTELL IN FRONT OF HIS TELEVISION SET." That Whitell wrote this piece from TV is no crime, but his lead sure leaves readers the impression that he was in the same general vicinity of Basayev when he had the foot amputated.

The second problem with this lead is that Whittell violates the simplest grade-school rules of composition by not giving his far-less informed reader the slightest clue as to how this Basayev person came to be having his foot amputated. I must confess to having read this article before I knew the amputation story in full, and was therefore totally baffled as I continued reading down this piece and discovered that Whittell doesn’t anywhere elaborate on the basic news elements of the amputation story. In fact, Whittell goes a full six paragraphs after the lead without returning to his introductory subject, and even then only to say:

‘...Mr Basayev, a former computer salesman and Soviet Army fireman, now ranks as Chechnya’s best-known warlord, loathed by the Russians but admired for his military daring. Minus a foot, he is more popular than ever among diehard separatists. But as a potential figurehead Mr Basayev is hamstrung, since Russia will not include him in talks.’

Is Whittell kidding here when he describes someone who’s just lost a foot as being politically "hamstrung"? I hope so.

In any case, Whittell’s article ultimately says more or less the following:

"I saw someone get his foot amputated on television and I either don’t know or don’t care to tell you why. There is a vicious power struggle going on between warlords in Chechnya, and I know this because Russian television, which has an interest in furthering this idea, told me. The Chechens claim they’re okay and united behind one guy but I don’t believe them because analysts working for Western think-tanks tell me not to. I also don’t believe him because even here from my seat in Moscow I, Giles Whittell, know what the Chechen people are really thinking ("The problem for Chechnya is that few people believe this," Whittell writes). Meanwhile that guy is still missing his foot and is therefore hamstrung politically. Hamstrung I say. Moving on, there is another guy out there who is a candidate to be a rebel leader [Zelimkhan Yanderbiyev] but I don’t have any additional information about him so that’s where my piece ends."

Whittell at least left The Moscow Times alone in this piece, but it didn’t help much. Boss Giles advances; Alice Lagnado goes back to the costume room.

Womack tried to worm her way out of the tournament by going on "vacation" over the last two weeks, but she advances anyway because Warren did absolutely nothing to deserve advancing. His laid-back Feb. 15 letter-from-Moscow piece, "TV puppets come under fire from Putin court", hits all the cylinders; it supports a cause worth supporting in the Kukli people, doesn’t try to do too much, is wittily and entertainingly written, and even manages to skillfully weave into the text an impressively pretentious term, "lese-majeste", without showing any strain on the surrounding sentences. Warren obviously has full control over the "letter from afar" genre--toss in a bunch of interesting news flashes, keep the segues short, keep it light and chatty, don’t over-dramatize the distance from home, etc. Pieces like this are what British reporters are designed for.

Womack didn’t file, but the strength of her previous work carries her past Warren on this one. In looking back at her work over the last year it was hard to avoid noticing that Womack has for some time (since the departure of Anna Blundy) been establishing herself as the Western press corps’ most fearsome anti-Russian-female terrorist. This paramilitary force of Russian women-haters to which she belongs has been operating above ground for about ten years in Russia, or ever since the mini-skirt arrived here. One of its most malicious practices involves calling Russian women whores for not being as ugly or badly-dressed as they are. In Womack’s piece from October 3 of last year, "Russian Dolls"--ostensibly an homage to Raisa Gorbacheva, but really an assault on cute Russian girls-- she shows ‘em how:

‘But to a young woman, dressed in skin-tight silver jumper and heavy make-up like a model going to a party (despite being a secretary on her lunch break), Gorbacheva meant nothing...’

Note Womack’s frustration at the girl being dressed up "despite being a secretary", whatever that means. Later on, she goes to the extreme lengths of quoting a Western p.r. consultant to get her real message across:

‘Lawrence McDonnell, a British businessman who runs a public relations company, Pravda, in Moscow, puts it more succinctly. "The look of a typical Russian woman in her twenties can be summed up in one word: sex," he says. "Frankly, if they were in Britain there’d be a danger of being thought of as tarty."’

I don’t know why Western female reporters persist in writing these stories. When they do, they’re as much as announcing to the world that they’re bitter, sexually-frustrated, unhappy people. And their stories are mean and petty to boot. Womack’s vacation tactic ineffective; she advances to round three.

Technically an upset, but not really--sort of like Tennessee beating the spread over the Rams. After two weeks of competition, we can definitely say this about Martin Nesirky: the man has his game face on. His February 3 piece, "Russian Security Chief Says No Need to Fear KGB", was a real crowd-pleaser. After about four graphs of it, actually, you could hear the fans stamping their feet and howling "We Will Rock You" at the doomed Bohlen.

The crux of his piece was that KGB veterans like Vladimir Putin are okay because a friendly KGB veteran who (just like you and me!) reads spy novels in English says so. Here’s how it leads:

‘MOSCOW, Feb 3 (Reuters)--Russia and the outside world need have nothing to fear from Soviet-era KGB agents such as Acting President Vladimir Putin, according to the secretary of the influential Security Council.

‘Sergei Ivanov, who spent 20 years in intelligence himself and reads English-language spy novels, told the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda in an interview published on Thursday there would be changes to the security services but no major shake-up.’

Nesirky’s lead sentence reads at first like a declarative statement of fact--the world has nothing to fear from Soviet-era ex-KGB agents. This is a standard straight-news rhetorical device, the leading off with a declarative assertion that actually belongs to an interview subject (for straight news reporters are not allowed to simply declare their own opinions), but even within the muddled ethics of wire-service writing Nesirky fails miserably here. For the usual practice with these sorts of leads is for the reporter to balance the lead assertion with a hastily-interjected antithesis a few paragraphs down, i.e. "But while Ivanov says X, others maintained that he is totally full of shit because of Y..."

Nesirky doesn’t do this. The entire article flows freely from the lead assertion, leading one to believe--and I actually do believe this--that Nesirky personally agrees with the idea that the world has nothing to fear from ex-KGB agents like Vladimir Putin. That this idea is transparently ridiculous on its face-obviously the world has lots to fear from ex-KGB agents, some of the world’s leading experts on torture, surveillance, and repression-doesn’t seem to bother Nesirky. In fact, the Reuters chief correspondent seems to be totally pacified, charmed even, by the glaringly irrelevant fact that Ivanov reads Frederick Forsyth novels.

This fact is introduced at the beginning and the end of the piece as a means of enhancing Ivanov’s credibility with Western readers, despite the fact that intelligence service vets who speak foreign languages usually learned them in service of official enmity of their subject countries. Ivanov knows English because he learned it in order to spy on us! And now that he’s telling us we shouldn’t worry about his former colleagues, we’re supposed to simply believe him, just because his taste in spy novels is as bad as ours? Nesirky seems a fool for buying into this idea, but he doesn’t stop there; he wants also to convince us that KGB veterans should simply be admired in general, because they are highly qualified professionals:

‘Ivanov, who worked as a spy in Europe and Africa, said those who harboured such fears should remember the KGB had employed only the best people.

‘``It was done in an extremely demanding and strict way,’’ he said. ``They only took the cream.’’’

Best people? Best at what? Nesirky doesn’t elaborate, or offer any evidence to debunk this increasingly popular argument, that having a KGB vet as President of Russia is not only not necessarily undesirable, but actually desirable, for the very reason that KGB people are such consummate professionals. Vladimir Putin is okay, the argument goes, because spies are good people. Nesirky appears to actually believe this himself; his text reads like an article written by a British spy frustrated by the lack of respect for his profession. Who knows, maybe he is.

One last thing about Nesirky’s piece; the entire thing was taken from Komsomolskaya Pravda. Not a single phone call in there. This just demonstrates what desperate lengths he was willing to go to to make his point. For a wire-service baron like Nesirky to run a full-fledged news analysis based on something with such minor news value, he had to have been either very hard up for a story or very excited about the theme personally. You be the judge.

In contrast to Nesirky’s article, Celestine Bohlen’s Feb. 2 piece, "Mothers Teach Art of Draft Dodging," reads like Shakespeare. In it she distances herself from her vile colleague Gordon by writing in great detail, through the vehicle of Russian war mothers, about what a tremendously evil pile of shit the Chechen war effort is. Like most of the contests in this round, this was a rout. Nesirky moves on.

This one went into overtime. At the eXile deadline, there was still no winner. Peach was about to advance automatically on the strength of Hoffman’s failure to file for two weeks, but then a rumor reached us that a piece of his was coming out soon, and we elected to wait. We can’t have too many forefeits; it wouldn’t be fair to the ticket holders. You’ll therefore see the results to two contests in this space in the next issue. Stay tuned. It’s March Madness, baby!

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